Why Compliance Automation Isn't Enough — Introducing Autonomous Compliance

There are 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs worldwide. Regulations aren't waiting. DORA is enforcing now. NIS2 is live. SOC 2 is table stakes for every B2B SaaS deal. And the mid-market — companies with 50 to 2,000 employees — can't hire the people they need to get compliant.

CISOs cost $200-350K. Consultants cost $150-500K per engagement and are booked 6-12 months out. Junior hires don't know the methodology. The cybersecurity industry has a structural problem, and it's getting worse.

Compliance Automation didn't solve this

Vanta and Drata automate evidence collection and workflows — and they do it well. But they still assume you have compliance people who know what to do. They made compliance faster. They didn't make it possible for companies without experts.

Think about what happens when a CTO at a 300-person SaaS company gets told "we need SOC 2 or we lose the enterprise deal." They sign up for a compliance automation tool. They see a dashboard with 200 controls. And then... what? Which controls apply? How do you score a risk? What goes in the Statement of Applicability? The tool assumes you already know.

The evolution of GRC

What makes Autonomous Compliance different

The key distinction: Compliance Automation and Agentic GRC make existing compliance teams more efficient. Autonomous Compliance makes compliance possible for companies that don't have compliance teams.

The analogy is self-driving cars. Compliance Automation is cruise control — you still need a driver. Agentic GRC is lane-assist — it helps the driver. Autonomous Compliance is self-driving — the human supervises, but the AI knows the route.

With RiskReady, the AI doesn't assist your compliance team. It is your compliance team. Tell it about your organisation — industry, size, tech stack, regulatory obligations — and it walks you through a proven 7-phase implementation journey. It creates your risk register, writes your policies, maps your controls, collects your evidence, and prepares your audit pack.

RiskReady — Security Dashboard

Human-in-the-loop: AI proposes, you approve

Every step, the AI proposes and a human approves. Full audit trail. The AI can't change anything without human approval. This isn't a black box making decisions about your compliance programme — it's a senior consultant that shows its work and waits for your sign-off.

AI Approval Queue — every change reviewed by a human

The 90% of the market that nobody serves

The companies paying $250K for Big Four consultants will keep paying — they have money and established relationships. They're not who we're building for.

We're building for the CTO who just got told "we need SOC 2 or we lose the deal." The compliance officer staring at DORA requirements with no methodology expertise. The operations director who Googled "ISO 27001 checklist" at midnight because there's no one else.

These companies don't need a cheaper consultant. They need compliance to be possible at all.

Open core: code is the distribution engine

RiskReady Community Edition is open source (AGPL) — a genuinely useful GRC platform with 9 working modules, free forever, self-hostable. When companies need the AI brain, the statistical data, the expert methodology, and the managed service — they go paid. Every paid tier gets everything.

Open code builds trust. AI methodology is the moat. We're not competing with Compliance Automation. We're creating the next category.